Four ghost stories to read with the lights on
M.R. James used to read his latest ghost story to friends on Christmas Eve, in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, by the light of a single candle. Many of the best ghost stories were written for that kind of light, though on Halloween it is worth having a little more of it.
The man who read by one candle
James, a medieval scholar who became Provost of King’s in 1905, read one of his first ghost stories to a Cambridge society called the Chit-Chat Club on 28 October 1893, three days before Halloween, as Wikipedia records. “I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the season of Christmas,” he wrote in the preface to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904.
On Christmas Eve, after carols in the chapel and dinner in hall, he would read to a few friends, colleagues and students at around midnight, as Darryl Jones, a professor of English at Trinity College Dublin, describes it. One of the friends who was there remembered how he “blew out all the candles but one, by which he seated himself”, according to Historic UK. James was clear about what he wanted his stories to do. If any of them made readers feel “pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours”, he wrote, his purpose would be achieved.
How dim a candle really is
An ordinary wax candle has a brightness of roughly one candela, the modern unit that replaced the old candlepower, which was based on a real candle, as Wikipedia explains. Hold one a foot from your book and you get about 11 lux, which is the old foot-candle, and from a metre away you get about 1 lux. A typical office is lit to 320 to 500 lux, according to Wikipedia, so even close up, one candle gives you only a few per cent of that.
Four to read this Halloween
“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, M.R. James (1904). A Cambridge professor on a golfing holiday on the Suffolk coast finds an old bronze whistle in some ruins, and reckons the Latin on it means “Who is this who is coming?” As he puts it, “the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him”.
“The Signal-Man”, Charles Dickens (1866). A traveller calls down into a deep railway cutting to the signalman at the bottom, who keeps watch over a red danger light at the mouth of a tunnel and is uneasy about something he has seen beside it. Dickens published it in the Christmas issue of his magazine, All the Year Round, the year after he survived a real rail crash at Staplehurst in Kent, and he died five years to the day after that crash.
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James (1898). A young governess takes charge of two children at Bly, a remote country house in Essex, and begins to see people around the house who should not be there. Critics have argued since the 1930s about what she really saw, and the story opens, fittingly, with friends telling ghost stories round the fire on Christmas Eve.
The Woman in Black, Susan Hill (1983). A young London solicitor is sent to sort out the papers of a client who has died, at Eel Marsh House, which stands on a tidal island in the marshes at the end of a causeway that floods at every high tide. It opens on Christmas Eve, with a family trading ghost stories after dinner and the narrator, now much older, insisting he has none to tell.
You can read the first three free at Project Gutenberg, in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Dickens’s Three Ghost Stories and The Turn of the Screw.
Reading them with the lights on
One candle suits a ghost story, but you still need to see the words. The HD Original puts 3,600 to 7,200 lux on your page at 50cm, depending on how you shape its beam, which is more than 300 times what a candle gives you from a foot away, so every word on your page is clear. You can try one at home for up to 90 days.